Systems and methods for estimating a parameter for a 3d model

ABSTRACT

The present invention estimates parameters for 3D models. Parameters may include, without limitation, surface topology, edge geometry, luminous or reflective characteristics, visual properties, characterization of noise in the signal, or other. A metric is estimated by quantifying a relationship between a received signal and a reference signal. The metric is then utilized to determine a parameter for a 3D model. The metric may include a measurement such as the cross-correlation of the received signal and the reference signal, or standard deviation of the difference of the received signal and the reference signal, for example. The parameter obtained may then be used to create a reference signal for determination of another parameter.

FIELD OF THE INVENTION

The present invention pertains to systems and methods for estimating a parameter for a three dimensional model. More specifically, the present invention pertains to systems and methods for estimating surface parameters such as surface topology, edge geometry, the amount of noise present, or other 3D parameters.

DESCRIPTION OF RELATED ART

The current state of the art in parameter estimation lacks the robustness to adequately estimate parameters for 3D models in the presence of noise. Thus, noise removal is limited by the inability to detect whether or not the noise removal process compromised the integrity of the original data. The current state of the art lacks a general solution that performs well at the edges of 3D models. The current state of the art in noise removal is limited by the inability to detect whether or not the noise removal process compromised the integrity of the original data. Furthermore, the current state of the art lacks a solution that refines data while enhancing visual quality, maintaining or improving physical accuracy, or reducing data size effectively. Finally, the current state of the art lacks a robust method for applying reflective image information to such a 3D model that has been adequately processed.

SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION

The present invention estimates parameters for 3D models. Parameters may include, without limitation, surface topology, edge geometry, reflective characteristics, visual properties, characterization of noise in the signal, or other. A metric is estimated by quantifying a relationship between a received signal and a reference signal. That metric is then utilized to determine a parameter for a 3D model. Recent advancements in 3-dimensional (3D) data acquisition have created the need for tools that create 3D models from the acquired points. Points representing the 3D position, orientation, or other aspect of objects can be acquired accurately and rapidly; however, tools are needed to automatically process those points into useful formats, such as simplified 3D surfaces. The current state of the art requires extensive manual intervention to get accurate results, or the resultant 3D surface contains too much data to be considered useful. Furthermore, current implementations do not harness the immense capabilities of parallel processing. Hence, there is a need to overcome these challenges by automatically generating a surface from a plurality of 3D determining a parameter from the estimated metric. The metric that quantifies a relationship between the received signal and a reference signal may comprise a correlation wherein the correlation is the expectation of the product of the received signal and a reference signal. Said metric may comprise an autocorrelation wherein the correlation is the expectation of the product of the received signal and an offset version of itself. Thus, the reference signal may be an offset version of the received signal, or may be a wavelet, sinusoid, Bezier curve, or other basis for reference. Likewise, the metric may be a quantification of error between the received signal and the reference signal including without limitation the maximum deviation, the median deviation, the mean deviation, the standard deviation, or other.

The received signal may include without limitation, a time based signal, or a spatially oriented signal, in one or more dimensions. The reference signal may be offset, scaled in one or more dimensions, partitioned, or altered in another way to attain a suitable metric for determining the parameter. The received signal comprises data that in some sense provide at least one characteristic of a 3D model, spatial, luminous, reflective, or other.

Determining the parameter may include without limitation, estimating the metric described herein that exhibits suitable properties such as the lowest mean, median, or standard deviation. The reference signal and the received signal may then be utilized to determine the parameter, based on the suitable property of the metric that has been estimated. Utilization of the reference and received signals may comprise extracting parameters directly from the received signal, directly from the reference signal, or a combination of the reference and received signals. Determining a parameter from the reference and received signals may comprise averaging both signals, linear time invariant filtering of both signals, or other operation.

Determining the parameter may comprise a numerical inversion technique such as: Newton method, Conjugate Gradient method, Line Search method, Steepest Descent method, Tikonov Regularization method, or other.

Furthermore, the reference signal may be determined by utilizing a parameter obtained by the present invention. Utilizing a parameter or set of parameters to determine the reference signal may comprise extracting suitable sections from a reference signal with more data. Extracting a section of the reference signal may utilize an edge detection method such as a Canny filter, Sobel filter, Hough transform, or other technique known to those skilled in the art.

If knowing a parameter such as surface topology is desired, the present invention may be utilized to extract an initial estimation of the topology of the surface. The present invention may points using parallel processing. The present invention removes noise, for example, by estimating the level of noise present and then filtering out the noise. The accuracy of the filtered data is verified to ensure that the integrity of the original data is not compromised. The present invention also refines data such as a three dimensional mesh by identifying regions to be refined and then refining those regions.

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE DRAWINGS

FIG. 1 is a set of 3D points representing a received signal that contains samples of the topology of a 3D surface.

FIG. 2 is a triangulated network of the 3D points.

FIG. 3 illustrates an extracted section of the polygons in the triangulated network and a reference signal.

FIG. 4 illustrates a block diagram depicting the architecture and data path of the present invention.

FIG. 5 illustrates a histogram of features of a generated surface.

FIG. 6 illustrates the local maxima of the peaks in the histogram.

FIG. 7 illustrates segmented regions surrounding the local maxima of the peaks in the histogram.

FIG. 8 shows an embodiment of the present invention to estimate noise in raw data, refine boundaries, breaklines, remove noise, then refine a three dimensional mesh.

DETAILED DESCRIPTION OF EXEMPLARY EMBODIMENTS

The present invention determines a parameter for a 3D model. The determined parameter may include without limitation, curvature, 3D surface, a slope, an angle, a position, a delay, topology, geometry, amount of noise present in the signal, boundary, non-coplanar surface intersection, normal vector, tangent plane, gradient, simple shape, or contour line.

One such embodiment of the present invention may comprise receiving a signal, estimating a metric that quantifies a relationship between the received signal and a reference signal, and further be utilized to determine the reflectance properties of the surface, from which characteristics pertaining to the amount of noise at any given location on the surface may be determined. Said characterization of noise may then be utilized with the present invention to isolate regions with common traits pertaining to the level of noise present, so that the further refinement of the surface may be effected. When the amount of noise present is known, determining the amount to which a metric may be considered suitable is more easily attained. When utilizing the standard deviation of the received signal and the reference signal to estimate a suitable metric for determining a parameter such as curvature of the edge of a 3D model, for example, the suitability depends largely on the amount of noise present. When a large amount of noise is detected in a certain region of a surface, for example, the tolerance for suitability increases.

It is understood that various 3D spatial data acquisition devices have non-linear noise characteristics. For example, 3D spatial data with normalized intensity values between 0% and 20% are ignored by some devices because the noise margin is too high. Likewise intensity values between 80% and 100% can be untrustworthy, if included in the data. Intensity values lower than 30% or higher than 70% exhibit excessive noise with respect to values outside of that range. Thus, segmentation may be utilized to isolate regions of common noise characteristics to better filter out the noise.

Furthermore, if determining a set of unknown parameters simultaneously is desired, and the problem represented does not have a unique solution, a range of acceptable values may be determined instead. For example, if diffuse reflectance and surface roughness were both unknown, but desired parameters, the surface roughness may be estimated among a set of suitable values, and the diffuse reflectance may then be determined as a corresponding set of values.

Diffuse reflectance may also be utilized to determine a parameter such as connectivity, for example. A set of 3D points may be connected in such a manner that in some sense best estimates the continuity of a particular type of surface. When the diffuse reflectance, for example, changes abruptly, a new surface may be created that adjoins, but is not merged with the neighboring surface.

FIG. 1 is a set of 3D points representing a received signal that contains samples of the topology of a 3D surface. FIG. 2 is a triangulated network of the 3D points formed by Delaunay or other triangulation technique. FIG. 3 illustrates an extracted section of the polygons in the triangulated network (100) that correspond to a specular highlight of the surface, that is then utilized with a reference signal (300) that is a set of points in a plane. The suitability of the metric associated with the relationship between the received and reference signals for these data may be held to a lower standard than that of the rest of the data, due to the excessive specular highlight.

FIG. 4 is a block diagram illustrating a parallel implementation to generate a surface from 3D points that includes importing 3D data 400, segmenting 3D data 410, performing in parallel a plurality of operations on 3D data using a plurality of channels of a graphics processing unit (GPU), network cluster, supercomputer, or central processing unit (CPU), the plurality of operations including one or more of surface generation operations 420, and exporting results of the plurality of operations for use in at least one subsequent operation 430.

3D data that may be utilized by the present invention includes, without limitation, terrestrial LiDAR, mobile LiDAR, aerial LiDAR, or from another 3D data acquisition device.

An exemplary embodiment of segmenting 3D data may include processing the data to determine proper boundaries for segmentation. Segmenting 3D data may include selecting a plurality of points that are related to each other in some fashion. Points may be determined to be related by methods including, without limitation, proximity to each other in 3D space, proximity to each other with respect to the angle or angles of projection from the acquisition device, acquisition time, cluster recognition (known to those skilled in the art) in one or more dimension of 3D space. The resultant size or sizes of segments may be determined by querying the capabilities (memory, processing power, or other) of the device utilized for segmenting, processing, or otherwise utilizing 3D data.

In another exemplary embodiment, the surface generation operations or segmentation method may include the removal of noise.

Performing in parallel a plurality of operations may includes calculating features of a surface or plurality of surfaces created from the 3D data into each of the plurality of channels with one of a plurality of kernels of 3D data input into each of the plurality of channels. Such features of a surface may include a method to calculate and assess a histogram of said features. Such features may include, without limitation, normal vectors of a surface created from the 3D data, localized clusters of points, or distances between points.

An exemplary embodiment of assessing the histogram 501 of features may comprise calculating the local and global maxima 500, 540, 550, 560, 570 of the histogram of normal vectors of a surface. The local maxima that were calculated correspond to maxima within clustered regions that appeared in the histogram 500, 510, 520, 530. In this exemplary embodiment regions of a surface may then be detected in the histogram that have common orientations in 3-dimensional space, such as a set of points that represent horizontal or vertical surfaces. Then, the present invention may partition the histogram into regions of similar orientation based on the global or local maxima of the histogram 600, 610, 620, 630, 640 by extracting regions of the surface that have surface normal vectors in the immediate vicinity of the local maxima. By selecting break lines in the histogram that surround a local or global maxima of the histogram, the present invention can better detect where a break line should occur. Other break lines may then be calculated at intervals surrounding the global or local maxima already determined 700, 710, 720, 740.

Another exemplary embodiment of calculating features of a surface may include the calculation of a dot product of a defined vector and the normal vectors of the surface. Any regions where the calculation of the dot product is sufficiently large, within a tolerance, may be combined to be coplanar. The outlying boundary of where the threshold is not met may be utilized as a break line or boundary for simplified mesh generation. Mother defined vector can then be passed and the process may be repeated to determine a simplified form of the resultant surface or set of surfaces.

The present invention may also be utilized to compare surface normal vectors of adjacent polygons without extracting a histogram of features. Such a technique will be far better than the current state of the art due to the nature of the parallel processing architecture that is described herein.

Yet another exemplary embodiment of the present invention may further comprise the utilization of joint information from the histogram of the normal vectors to then determine proper vectors for calculating the dot product. If no normal vectors exist in certain bands of the histogram, those vectors are not used in determining the dot product with the normal vectors of the surface.

The present invention may include utilizing user defined parameters. A user may require that as few as possible polygons representing the surface are exported. In this case, the user may define a tolerance for accuracy. A plurality of polygons representing a generated surface or portion of the surface can then be combined to form a single polygon representing the generated surface or portion of the surface without losing accuracy beyond the tolerance specified. This can be accomplished by calculating the distance from the point (vertex) or points (vertices) to be removed and the plane of the proposed polygon.

Thus, a simplified surface from regions within the 3D data where the surface represented by a plurality of 3D objects (such as triangles) can be represented as a single 3D object can be generated. Such exemplary embodiments exhibit extraordinary processing performance due to the nature of the parallel implementation described herein.

Furthermore, an exemplary embodiment of the present invention may include mapping visual information to the 3D objects that represent the surface that has been generated as a texture map. The texture map may consist of color or intensity information retrieved at the time the 3D data were acquired. Such visual information may be mapped to polygons representing the surface by linear projection of original 3D points that have since been removed. 3D data may represent color information acquired independent of the 3D data acquisition device, from a device such as a digital camera.

An exemplary embodiment may include mapping depth information that describes perturbations in the surface or the surface normal vectors to an array of values to be stored, rendered, or otherwise utilized in determining more detail related to the generated surface. Modern day graphics shading processors are able to parse arrays of values that typically represent visual information in other ways, such as depth maps or normal vector maps. Once break lines outlining a desired region in a surface are determined, the deviation of the surface from any point within the surface can be determined in a grid or array and then stored as a depth map. Likewise normal information may be stored in a similar manner, and more efficiently rendered on graphics hardware.

The present invention removes noise by estimating the level of noise present and then filtering out the noise. The accuracy of the filtered data is verified to ensure that the integrity of the original data is not compromised. The present invention also refines data such as a three dimensional mesh by identifying regions to be refined and then refining those regions.

FIG. 8 is a block diagram showing an embodiment of the present invention to estimate noise 800 in raw data 810, refine boundaries 850, breaklines 840, remove noise 820, then refine a three dimensional mesh 830. The systems and methods shown herein produce a noise reduced, refined mesh 860.

The removal of noise utilizing the systems and methods comprising the present invention may be accomplished in many different ways. The first step is the identification of the level of noise present in the data. One embodiment of the present invention for noise estimation may include the utilization of a clustering technique, such as k-means clustering, known to those skilled in the art. Via k-means clustering, one may detect common characteristics in the data, such as position in space, orientation relative to the acquisition device, or other. Once common properties have been identified and data sharing common properties have been isolated, the degree of randomness in the data can be detected. If the data have a common orientation, like points in three dimensional space that form the planar surface of a wall or a floor, for example, the orientation may be estimated, then the degree of variance from that estimated planar surface represents the estimated level of noise in the data. Other common properties may include, without limitation, distance from acquisition device, orientation of acquisition angle (vertical or horizontal), or other.

Another embodiment of the present invention may comprise the application of a filter to the raw data, and then estimate the deviation of the filtered data from the original. In doing so, the filtered data may be analyzed to ensure that the deviations present reflect characteristics of the anticipated noise in the system. If a data acquisition device with noise that had an expected zero-mean statistical characteristic were used to acquire the data, the deviation of the true data from the acquired data would have a zero mean, locally as well as globally, where the local region could be chosen by an arbitrarily large sample space. If filtered data do not exhibit expected characteristics relative to the raw data, sufficient adjustments may be made to correct the data to reflect results of a higher likelihood of accuracy.

The present invention may also be embodied in systems and methods that utilize a priori information regarding elements that affect the statistical characteristics of noise. Such characteristics could include, without limitation, the angle of surface relative to the seamier, the typical standard deviation of the particular data acquisition device used in acquiring the data, surface reflectivity, acquired data amplitude such as LiDAR data intensity, etc. When additional a priori information is present, a locally isolated region of relatively constant standard deviation (variance, or other characteristic) may be identified and processed independently until all regions of relatively constant variances have been processed. Such a system or method may be referred to operating on a locally consistent region.

Once the amount of noise present has been estimated, the noise may be removed. One such system and method for noise removal may comprise the usage of a directional filter. A directional filter may comprise positive and negative components of orthogonal vectors. Directional vectors may include, without limitation, range, polar or azimuth angles in spherical coordinates; x, y, or z vectors in Cartesian coordinates; u, or v coordinates (horizontal or vertical components of an image, for example); or other. A directional filter may be implemented by assigning each data point such as a three dimensional spatial data point, for example, a filtering direction. The filtering direction may comprise more than one direction component, since not all data are oriented perfectly in a single direction. The assigning of a filtering direction may include the correlation between neighboring data points' orientations and a particular filtering direction, for example. Elements that could be used to specify filtering direction may include, without limitation, surface normal, range, intensity, color information from a digital image acquisition device, or other.

Furthermore, the filtering direction vector at a given data point may be updated (adapted) as the filtering process progresses to more accurately represent the properties of the surface and the desired filtering direction. Likewise, as the filtering process progresses, filtered data may be analyzed to ensure that the deviation between the raw data and the filtered data exhibit proper statistical characteristics, such as locally identified regions of zero or near zero mean, or a sufficient number of data points lie within a specified tolerance, based on the estimated level of noise in the original data.

If the filtered data represent the mesh of a three dimensional surface, the mesh may be further refined by the present invention. The refinement of the mesh may comprise breakline extraction, boundary extraction, or mesh simplification. A breakline is a line that separates two potentially non-coplanar surfaces. The estimation of a breakline may be accomplished by several different methods, such as those disclosed in patent application 61/131,495, systems and methods for efficient utilization of 3D spatial data and image data, included herein by reference. Another embodiment that may be employed for the estimation and refinement of breaklines may be found in patent application 61/138,191, systems and methods for parallel implementation to generate a surface from 3D points, included herein by reference.

Additionally, the estimation of breaklines may be accomplished by applying a filter to the data and then statistically analyzing the degree of deviation from the original data. Breaklines can at times appear as connected regions of excess deviation from original data.

Boundaries are lines that represent the outermost edges of disconnected regions of data. Boundaries may be automatically detected by analyzing changes in properties of the data. If the distance from the data acquisition device, for instance, were to change abruptly, this may indicate a boundary separating from one region to another. Such a measure of change may be accomplished by a high pass filter, a simple derivative, a vectorized multivariable derivative, second derivative, or other. Such system or method of measurement may utilize a filtering direction vector, as described herein, to quantify the change in a particular property.

Lines (whether breaklines or boundaries) may be refined based on the results of an edge detection scheme such as a Prewitt, Sobel, Canny, Gaussian or other edge detection algorithm. Once a breakline or boundary has been extracted, a filter utilized along the extracted line may be employed to clean up an otherwise jagged edge.

The noise reduced data may further include the reduction of unnecessary components. A mesh, for example, may have an excessive number of polygons. The breaklines and boundaries identified within this present invention may be utilized to further refine the data. Weights of relative importance may be assigned to various points within the mesh, such as along a breakline or a boundary. Polygon reduction schemes may utilize weighting properties to prioritize the elements of the mesh in a particular fashion. Vertices along a breakline or boundary may be more important to retain than those within a relatively coplanar region.

Mesh simplification may further be performed iteratively to ensure the accuracy is maintained. Where reduces mesh components compromise the integrity of the data, corrections may be made to ensure accuracy. This may include the insertion of polygons into the refined mesh, simply adjusting the vertices of the reduced mesh, or other method to restore the required accuracy.

Accordingly, it is to be understood that the embodiments of the invention herein described are merely illustrative of the application of the principles of the invention. Reference herein to details of the illustrated embodiments is not intended to limit the scope of the claims, which themselves recite those features regarded as essential to the invention. Furthermore, the systems and methods represented herein may comprise a program storage device, a computer, hardware, software, FPGA, ASIC, ROM, or other device or element. 

1-34. (canceled)
 35. A method for refining a surface of a 3D object, the method comprising; receiving data representing the surface of a 3D object into memory of a processing unit, said data comprising data from a data acquisition device indicative of a surface property of an object, estimating the level of noise associated with the data with a processing unit; identifying a breakline or a plurality of breaklines with a processing unit; refining the surface or surfaces within a breakline with a processing unit; and refining the breakline or plurality of breaklines with the processing unit.
 36. The method of claim 35 wherein said received data comprises; 3D spatial data that have been previously filtered.
 37. The method of claim 35 wherein said received data comprises; 3D spatial data that have been previously segmented using an edge detection algorithm applied to a material property of the data.
 38. The method of claim 37 wherein said edge detection algorithm comprises; a Canny edge detection method, Sobel edge detection method, Hough Transform feature detection method, or a binary mask based on an aspect of at least of said surface's material properties.
 39. The method of claim 35 wherein said estimating the level of noise comprises; utilizing a clustering algorithm to segment said received data by distance, planarity, or orientation of acquisition angle; calculating a statistical metric associated with the cluster; apply said statistical metric to the data within the cluster.
 40. The method of claim 35 wherein estimating the level of noise comprises; applying a filter to said data; estimating the deviation of the filtered data from said received data; calculating the characteristics of the said deviation.
 41. The method of claim 35 wherein estimating the level of noise further comprises; applying a filter to said data; estimating the deviation of the filtered data from said received data; calculating the noise characteristics of the said deviation.
 42. The method of claim 35 wherein estimating the level of noise comprises; receiving into memory of a processing unit a previously computed estimate of the level of noise or a plurality of previously computed estimates of the level of noise.
 43. The method of claim 35 wherein: said breakline is a boundary comprising at least one breakline datum that is adjacent to, but unconnected to at least one other breakline datum.
 44. The method of claim 35 wherein identifying a breakline or plurality of breaklines comprises; filtering said received raw data; and identifying filtered data that do not exhibit expected characteristics relative to the raw data when compared to the estimated level of noise present.
 45. The method of claim 35 wherein identifying a breakline or plurality of breaklines comprises; calculating a histogram of normal vectors; identifying the peak of said histogram; computing the dot product of all normal vectors of surface data and the normal vector at the peak of the histogram; segmenting said histogram according to the deviation from the computed dot product.
 46. The method of claim 35 wherein refining a breakline or plurality of breaklines, or surface or plurality of surfaces comprises; filtering said received data; and adjusting the filtered data to correct the surface so that a higher statistical likelihood of accuracy is attained, based on a characteristic of the estimated noise present.
 47. The method of claim 35 wherein refining a breakline or plurality of breaklines, or surface or plurality of surfaces comprises; computing parameters for a directional filter; and applying said directional filter to said received data; and adjusting the directionally filtered data to correct the surface so that a higher statistical likelihood of accuracy is attained, based on a characteristic of the estimated noise present.
 48. The method of claim 47 wherein computing said parameters for a directional filter comprises; computing a metric based on a material or geometric property of the received data; assigning parameters for a directional filter based on said metric.
 49. The method of claim 48 wherein computing said parameters for a directional filter comprises updating said directional parameters from one iteration of data refinement to the next.
 50. The method of claim 35 wherein refining a plurality of breaklines and surfaces enclosed within breaklines comprises; receiving data corresponding to a plurality of breaklines and surfaces enclosed within breaklines into memory of a plurality of parallel processing units; refining said breaklines and surfaces independently with said plurality of parallel processing units; receiving the plurality of refined breaklines into memory of a central processing unit;
 51. The method of claim 35 wherein refining said surface further comprises; eliminating undesired polygons.
 52. The method of claim 51 wherein eliminating undesired polygons further comprises; comparing refined polygons to a user defined tolerance; replacing a plurality of relatively coplanar polygons with a single polygon that is within a distance of the user specified tolerance.
 53. The method of claim 52 wherein the deviation between said single polygon and the refined polygons is received into memory as an array of deviations to be utilized as a depth map.
 54. The method of claim 44 wherein filtering said received data comprises; receiving a basis segment of data; receiving a reference signal; estimating a correlation between the basis segment of data and the reference signal; determining a metric or a plurality of metrics associated with said correlation; determining the likelihood of the basis segment of data resembling the reference signal based on the estimated noise. 